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Migration Assistant In Ubuntu 9.04

01-07-2009, 01:40 PM

Phoronix: Migration Assistant In Ubuntu 9.04

When checking out a recent daily LiveCD of Ubuntu 9.04 (the Jaunty Jackalope), the migration wizard found in the Ubiquity installer now supports migrating files from an Ubuntu installation. With Ubuntu 7.04 the Ubuntu Migration Assistant was introduced into the LiveCD installer to automatically transfer documents, pictures, bookmarks, and even the wallpaper from a Microsoft Windows installation on the hard drive over to Ubuntu. Two years later it's now beginning to work nicely if you want to transfer your documents and settings from an earlier Ubuntu Linux installation into a fresh Ubuntu installation. Right now though the only option we were presented with is for transferring our Mozilla Firefox settings and bookmarks from an Ubuntu 8.10 setup into this latest Jaunty build...

I've customized my app settings for everything from Transmission to Firefox to Rhythmbox..
It needs to import everything in my ~/, as well as make a list of all my installed apps on Ubuntu and let me choose which ones to install with the rest of the OS.

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Why not just have your /home as a separate partition like most sane distro's default too? No wizards required.

Because then I run out of space in my /home while I still have space in my / and have to resize stuff and whatnot.
If it were up to me, Ubuntu would default to a swap file instead of a linux-swap partition.

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Because then I run out of space in my /home while I still have space in my / and have to resize stuff and whatnot.
If it were up to me, Ubuntu would default to a swap file instead of a linux-swap partition.

If that's the case then really your / is too large to begin with. Migration wizards such as the one being offered now actually increase the required amount of space to successfully migrate.

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... causing various incompatibilities due to varying application versions (evolution: been there, done that). Then I'd rather have application-specific but fully functional migration assistants instead of untrackable breaking after having upgraded.

When all applications can guarantee good backwards compatibility though, a separate /home is indeed the way to go

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... causing various incompatibilities due to varying application versions (evolution: been there, done that). Then I'd rather have application-specific but fully functional migration assistants instead of untrackable breaking after having upgraded.

When all applications can guarantee good backwards compatibility though, a separate /home is indeed the way to go

Odd, in all the years that I have used in linux I have never ran across such an issue (granted I gave up on using evolution years ago). Even KDE3 apps to KDE4 apps went smooth. I don't use gnome so perhaps ithe breaking of apps is a gnome feature. I even have one system that has had the same /home directory dating back to SuSE 8 and has been upgraded all the way to 11.1 with no major issues at all.